Theme Building Made Easy (Nearly)

We’ve enjoyed working with Drupal and WordPress to provide a range of client websites.  Both tools cover most of the requirements for content management (CMS) that you are ever likely to need. They are mature products and the community support is excellent.

Themes or templates (whatever you like to call them) usually take the most time and as a non-designer it can take even longer. I was excited to see recently the buzz surrounding a new product called Artisteer which made claims to easily generate themes for both Drupal and WordPress alongside the other well deployed CMS Joomla. I was a little skeptical as well if I am honest, having been a developer of websites for nearly 15 years I’ve tried many website generator products that simply failed to live up to the purpose they were designed for. It didn’t take long, 10 minutes and my faith had grown in Artisteer exponentially. It is suprisingly simple to use and does exactly what it says on the tin.

To get you started Artisteer lets you choose your CMS and then will automatically make a suggestion layout for you. You can then use the ‘Ideas’ menu to make some more quick suggestion changes to colours, fonts, layout and background. It then also has CMS specific suggestion options such as header, blocks, buttons, menus and so on.

Once you have a reasonable layout you can then delve deeper into the menu system to modify your base layout and brand a theme for your specific needs. I am not going to go into major detail as you can read about the features on the Artisteer website but you can trust me when I say that there isn’t much you can’t do with it.

With all the positives there are inevitably aspects of Artisteer that would stop someone with no experience completing the end result to a professional manner that all clients should expect. We are currently working on 7 themes and all so far have required a degree of manual intervention to make things work smoothly. Good skills in CSS are still required and because we have that we are getting some great end products.

Overall Artisteer can help a seasoned developer rapidly produce a theme that can be modified to suit far quicker than building one from scratch or using an existing theme as a starting block. This process can save many hours which in my opinion is well worth the $130 license fee.

Artisteer has become a instant friend of Intelligenta and being a stickler for the rules of the web I was pleased to see my first theme passed the W3C validators with flying colours….Impressive!

(We will update this post with examples as they are finished and signed off)